Matthews's Synonym for Bigotry: 'Culturally Conservative' on Race

April 23rd, 2008 8:22 PM

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In Chris Matthews's mind, a bigot is someone who's "culturally conservative" on race. Matthews equated the two on this evening's Hardball in attempting to explain exit polling from yesterday's PA primary showing that 38% of white Catholic Democrats wouldn't vote for Obama in the general election.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, somebody who doesn't like that group of voters might call them Archie Bunkers. I'll call them Reagan Democrats, John [Baer of the Philadelphia Daily News], they're Reagan Democrats: people who are culturally conservative, maybe a little culturally conservative on the racial front, on the ethnic front. They like to think of themselves as Democrats on the economic issues, but when it comes to the squeeze, on some of these cultural issues--didn't this all come up earlier about three weeks ago in San Francisco, this conversation.

So declining to vote for Barack Obama amounts to being "culturally conservative on the racial front." You wouldn't think that branding as bigots a broad swathe of the electorate would be the way to go for a budding senatorial candidate like Chris. In any case, it's revealing of Matthews's fundamental animus towards conservatism.

NB: the exit polling data displayed by Norah O'Donnell in the video clip doesn't identify the white Catholics as Dems, but so they would appear to be. This was exit polling done in the Dem primary, a closed primary restricted to registered Dems. So Operation Chaos folks aside, we're talking about Dems here, and Matthews identifies them as such. For that matter, if 59% of all white Catholics including Republicans were planning to vote for Obama, that would of course be a surprising landslide in his favor.